Powerful Photography: Product Photography for Ecommerce Websites

Oh I do love a beautifully designed online shop! And as well as clear navigation, ease of finding what you’re looking for and the general reassurance and conviction that comes from a well designed, easy to use shop, one of the things that’ll make an enormous difference in your sales is the quality of your photography.

Your visitors can’t pick up and touch what you’re selling, so they need to be able to get a really good idea of what they’re buying – and really feel the pull of desire, via your website. And design and photography is core to that. Later this year we’ll be launching a powerful ecommerce series. But for now, let’s focus on what makes good product photography.

For me it’s about a mix of product, lifestyle and model shots. And in an ideal world you’d have all three.

You need a selection of very clear product shots so that people can actually see what it is that they’re buying. But detail and clarity alone don’t create desire. So a lifestyle shot of your products in situ will really help create an emotional connection.

And if you’re selling something that can be worn, a model shot is known to increase sales. Think of the Boden catalogue – it’s always the items that are on the models that sell out first isn’t it? Why? Well I guess because we like looking of pictures of people, and also because it helps us visualise what something might look like on us.

But the cutaway shots – whilst not as glamorous, certainly help with the challenge of knowing what you’re buying.

And if you can have the model on the same page, so much the better!

So great product photography: cutout shots to show what you’re buying, lifestyle shots to increase desire (sometimes you can combine these two) and model shots to help visitors visualise the piece on them. What else do you think is important in product photography?

Fabulous post again Fiona – it was very important that in my shoot for Lisa from More Than Word Art that we showed all the products clearly and that the styling was balanced enough to not be too distracting but to also compliment and add a ‘lifestyle’ feel to the images. This way they could be used for lots of uses – clear and concise for selling on the website but also not out of place in a lifestyle feature in a magazine. We also did some close-up details shots so that people were able to see the quality and fonts in detail.

Eddie’s comment about taking images that could be used for lots of uses is really valid – especially if on a small budget, which a lot of businesses are – photography always seems to be one area that many people don’t put high enough up the list so selling it this way could actually be a good compromise.